Not only did we pay attention, we paid through the nose.

Scott McLemee has a great interview with Jeet Heer, on the original Little Orphan Annie:

In 1931, Daddy Warbucks loses his fortune to unscrupulous Wall Street speculators, is blinded, and lives for a time as a street beggar. But after hitting bottom he regains his fighting spirit and outwits the Wall Street sharks who brought him and America low. By 1932, the villains in the strip are increasingly identified with the political left: snide bohemian intellectuals who mock traditional values, upper-crust class traitors who give money to communists, officious bureaucrats who hamper big business, corrupt labour union leaders who sabotage industry, demagogic politicians who stir up class envy in order to win elections, and busybody social workers who won’t let a poor orphan girl work for a living because of their silly child labor laws. Gray started to identify liberalism with elitism, a potent bit of political framing which continues to shape political discourse in American today.

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I haven’t read Hagar the Horrible in a long time, but isn’t taking Hagar’s beliefs at face value as representative of the cartoonist roughly the equivalent of taking Archie Bunker’s beliefs as representative of the writers of _All in the Family_? There’s a reason he isn’t called Hagar the Wise.

There’s a world of difference. Archie and Meathead were foils for each other’s foibles. Drama is a more complex and nuanced medium than a comic strip. (I have no disdain for the obvious.) I always assume that a cartoon character making a quasi-political statement either reflects the views of the cartoonist, or the exact opposite, for some kind of an effect.

Wow, so why did FDR show up in the musical? Was it a deliberate thumb in the eye to the source material?

Good question. In 1976-77, living memory of the Great Depression (and of the strip’s radio-show heyday) would have been a lot more alive and kicking than it is now, so the idea of Annie as inspiration to FDR would have seemed clearly ludicrous to some. On the other hand, there were probably lots of Little Orphan Annie readers who’d never connected her with anti-New Deal politics at all (I seldom read it, and it never clicked until now), who just wanted mindless entertainment.

Like any popular and critically well-regarded stage play, Annie worked on several levels for several kinds of audiences, and Thomas Meehan was the kind of writer who could deliver that sort of thing, kitsch and all, tongue firmly in cheek.

Which also means there are all kinds of ways to get it wrong, by looking at it too narrowly. From JW Matviko’s The American president in popular culture, pp. 52-3:

Douglas Watt of the New York Daily News called the portrayal of Roosevelt “a tasteless caricature” and Jack Kroll of Newsweek describes the character as an “amiable boob of a President” who is inspired by Annie’s saccharine song “Tomorrow” to create the New Deal. This mockery of a long-revered president is not surprising when one considers that in the post-Watergate, recession-plagued America of 1977, such optimism must have seemed naive and laughable to many theatergoers.